I'm not saying it applies to all those commenting negatively, but one commonly held philosophy amongst some of my geek friends is this logic:
"the world is terrible and people are terrible" -> "there's no point trying to improve things" -> "I don't need to improve things"
It's essentially an argument that allows people to live a defeatist (selfish?) life without feeling guilty.
Anyone who stands up and says "we can make things better and I'm going to do it!" is an immediate threat to this philosophical position. If Elon Musk can make the world(s) a better place, then it's much harder for me to maintain that all humans are selfish and evil, and it's harder to justify living a selfish and cynical existence. Hey, maybe I'm wrong about things, maybe I need to mature and learn about the world, which means the stance I've held all my life is incorrect and that is a scary thing to contemplate. It takes great self-awareness to move beyond that position.
I don't know why these thoughts correlate with being a programmer. Perhaps it's somewhat related to seeing things in a very black and white manner: things are good or bad. Elon Musk is a hero or a charlatan or he can't achieve what he says he will and he will fail and therefore it's pointless.
Here's an example I came across recently: "people are individually smart and collectively stupid, therefore we are doomed wrt politics and climate change." But the mature, adult, response is to ask "how can we help people better make collective decisions?"
Overall, this thinking comes across as childlike, failing to appreciate the subtleties in how progress is made, and the reality that nothing is all good or all bad, all failure or all success.